An Introduction to Control Center Personalities in DB2 Universal Database

June 30, 2004

by Paul C. Zikopoulos and Roman B. Melnyk

If you come from a Windows background, you are likely to leverage a graphical user interface (GUI) to perform most of the management tasks for your environment, including managing your IBM DB2 Universal Database (DB2 UDB) server. The Control Center is the GUI tool that provides database administrators (DBAs) with a central location from which to perform DB2-related administration tasks, and more.

In this article, we will introduce you to a new feature of the Control Center that is planned for the DB2 UDB "Stinger" release called: Control Center Personalities. Personalities allow you to control the surfaced objects and the actions that you can perform on them.

Why Control Center "Personalities"?

The Control Center provides a complete range of functionality and features for all users, regardless of their skill set. For experienced DBAs, or "power" users, all of this functionality presented at all times can complicate navigation of the Control Center and make task execution more inefficient.

For example, an ACCPAC business partner is likely to use the Control Center merely to run the Configuration Advisor and create a schema object. Before "Stinger," this novice DB2 user might have been confused when drilling down the Control Center's object tree to find the database, wondering what an instance is, and so on.

The Control Center before "Stinger" looked like the following figure:

Notice how long the object tree under the Databases folder is when fully expanded. It doesn't even fit on the screen.

In DB2 UDB "Stinger," personalities can be used to simplify navigation and reduce the potential complexity for users who do not need an all-encompassing management tool for their DB2 database environment. With personalities, you can use the Control Center in either Basic mode or Advanced mode (in this mode, the Control Center functions like it did before "Stinger"), or customize the Control Center's surfaced objects and the actions that can be performed on them.

Starting the Control Center in DB2 UDB "Stinger"

When the Control Center starts, the Control Center View window (shown below) opens. This window allows you to select a personality for the Control Center's current run time.

If you want the selected personality to persist, so that it starts the same way each time, deselect the Show this window at startup time check box.

If you've configured the Control Center to always start with the Basic personality, but you later want to perform a more advanced function, or perhaps want to customize the Control Center, you can change the personality without restarting the Control Center by clicking on Tools-->Tools Settings, and selecting Customize Control Center (shown below), which opens the Control Center View window shown in the previous figure.